


the nearest-run thing

by rain_sleet_snow



Category: The Mummy (1999), The Unknown Ajax - Georgette Heyer
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Battle Of Waterloo, Crossover, Drunkenness, F/M, Family, Family History, Gen, Male Friendship, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-17
Updated: 2021-01-17
Packaged: 2021-03-15 13:27:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28814148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: Jonathan, drunk and remembering, engages in some wishful thinking about family and war and sleeping through the night. Rick collects his stuff before Evy can fall over it.
Relationships: Anthea Darracott/Hugo Darracott, Evy Carnahan O'Connell/Rick O'Connell, Jonathan Carnahan & Evy Carnahan O'Connell & Rick O'Connell, Jonathan Carnahan & Rick O'Connell
Comments: 18
Kudos: 79





	the nearest-run thing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PoppaeaSabina (AellaIrene)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AellaIrene/gifts).



> Poppaeasabina asked me for Georgette Heyer/The Mummy with canon timelines!

Rick was awake chiefly because Evy was, working feverishly by lamplight on some galleys that needed to go to the printer tomorrow; after the first of these late-night sessions, he had bowed to inevitability and/or the crick in his back by dragging in a large armchair and a blanket. He could doze in these quite comfortably, waking whenever Evy made herself an ill-advised midnight cup of coffee, or swore particularly vehemently, or asked him to fetch down a reference book.

This time it was the bang of Jonathan entering the front door and hurling it shut that woke him. Evy started, and knocked her inkpot flying – with no effect, since after the first few times she’d done this she’d started keeping the pot closed. Both of them listened out: the butler, a man whose memory stretched well back into the last century, never waited up for Young Master Jonathan, but serious havoc might attract his attention. None was audible, so Evy relaxed. But then they heard that Jonathan was singing.

Rick’s brother-in-law had a fine tenor voice and considerable volume at his disposal, and he often sang when drunk. Public school drinking songs or obscure Arabic ditties were usually a sign of a good mood, and were preferable to him falling over and smashing his grandmother’s ornaments. _Tipperary_ was serious cause for concern, though. And when Jonathan muddled the words and started in on _Land of Hope and Glory_ , Evy’s eyes met Rick’s with real concern.

“I’ll go,” Rick said, lifting a hand. “Don’t worry.”

“Thank you, Rick,” Evy sighed. She bit the end of her pen, and transferred ink from one palm to her cheek. “I do worry about him.”

“Course you do. It’s Jonathan. He can’t take a step without putting his foot in it.”

Evy laughed, but weakly. Rick folded up his blanket and went to find Jonathan.

Jonathan was not in the hall, and though his elegant black coat and hat had been flung aside with no regard for tidiness or common sense there was no trail of destruction to lead Rick to him. Instead, Rick draped the coat over a chair and plonked the hat in the bowl for calling cards - very full, since Evy had to society’s surprise returned to England as Mrs Evelyn Carnahan O’Connell and immediately embarked on a doctoral degree - and followed the echoes of Jonathan’s singing. He seemed to know every verse of _Land of Hope and Glory_ , including some which might have been sung in the trenches but probably couldn’t be printed without violating indecency laws. 

Jonathan himself had never been in the trenches, not to Rick’s knowledge, and he very rarely spoke of the Great War, unless it was one of his morbid jokes. Rick knew from Evy that she and Jonathan had been trapped in Egypt by the tides of war in 1915, and both her parents had gone down with their torpedoed ship when they tried to reach their children. Jonathan, sole guardian at twenty-one of a sheltered fifteen-year-old sister, was never officially called up; but Rick’s own memories of the war made him suspect that both Carnahan siblings had seen war service. Evy could be erratic and clumsy, but her secretarial work never was, and she solved codes as a pleasant break from working on hieroglyphics. She read, spoke, and wrote fluent English, French, German and at least two forms of Arabic, and though she couldn’t pass for Egyptian, she knew the country well and (being deeply associated with the archaeological community) could be found anywhere on any day without exciting suspicion. 

Rick found Jonathan's opera scarf knotted around the neck of a statue. He left it there.

All the points that applied to Evy applied to Jonathan, except that he was older, harder and a much better shot, with a distinctive casual bitterness about mortality that Rick recognised. Jonathan claimed to have had a dicky back throughout the war which had excused him from real service, and his volatile nature didn’t seem an ideal fit for military discipline, but some people Rick had known back in the day went very quiet when they wished Rick happy and asked the name of his new in-laws. There were plenty of serious people who knew serious things about what Jonathan Carnahan had been up to on his country’s service. Not all of the Great War’s evils were found in the trenches.

Jonathan was a light-fingered, disreputable, and frequently dishonest little shit, Rick thought, retrieving (in succession) cane, highly polished right and left shoe (one bereft of shoelaces) and a single sock. But Rick couldn’t help feeling bad for him. And now that the singing had stopped he was slightly worried.

The door to the portrait gallery was open a crack, a gleam of light shining from it. A bow tie hung off the handle, tied in a loose knot. Rick untied it, and noticed, with misgiving, that it had formed a noose. He left it on a chair with the cane, shoes, and sock, consigning the lost shoelace to whatever god would have it. Then he pushed the door open, and went in search of his brother-in-law.

Jonathan was not hard to find. He had lost his other sock and his dinner jacket, and was wandering through the portrait gallery with a single lamp, staring wistfully up at the pictures. He was humming. Rick thought it might be _We Don't Want To Lose You, But We Think You Ought To Go_ \- a conclusion encouraged by the way the humming swelled and then broke out into a full-throated bellow of the chorus.

"Will you keep it down, Jonathan?" Rick said, and by reflex caught the lamp when Jonathan started and dropped it.

"Rick! Jolly old Rick! You gave me a jolly old turn, my lad!"

Drunk as a skunk, Rick concluded. He allowed Jonathan to sling an arm around his shoulders and lean heavily into him. "Evy's working."

"Oh." Jonathan's voice sunk to a penetrating whisper. "Oh. Well, no fear, old son, you can trust me to keep quiet." He giggled, high-pitched and disconcerting. "Quiet as a wee tiny moosie. I can keep quiet about all _sorts_ of things."

Recognising Jonathan's imitation of a particular Scottish intelligence officer who had died in 1917, Rick cast about for something to distract him. Fortunately, Jonathan found something all by himself.

"Never told you about all these people!" he cried, waving an expansive arm at the portraits on the walls. The Carnahan collection was pretty small, apparently, and only reached back into the last century, but since Rick's knowledge of his antecedents stopped with the approximate date of his birth it was still pretty impressive to him. "Dragged you all over the ancestral mausoleum! Never showed you any of the pictures. Except for the photographs. We showed you the photographs?"

Jonathan looked so worried all of a sudden that Rick felt a pang. He nodded encouragingly. Jonathan's mother Ilisabek, though trained as an expedition artist, had pioneered archaeological photography; her pictures all looked as if they had been lined up next to a scale and painstakingly composed for maximum detail and clarity, regardless of whether or not they contained human beings, but Jonathan and Evy had been at pains to show him every last one.

"Good. Wonderful photographer, my mother! Another great talent lost. Of course everyone looks like a corpse in her pictures but they are _very_ clear. None of this overexposed poppycock." Jonathan's tongue bounced off every syllable of his last word with childish pleasure, and he repeated it to himself several times, obviously very pleased with it. "That's her there." He pointed waveringly to a bust of a girl done in pastels, and a watercolour very clearly by Evy, whose talents lay elsewhere. Only a very loving parent would have framed it. It was dated July 1914, and it showed the smiling, matronly version of the solemn girl in pastels and the radiant bride in a full-length portrait in oils.

"Hideous scandal when they got married," Jonathan pronounced, dragging Rick over to the oil painting. Mr and Mrs Carnahan had been painted in finery of thirty years ago, looking handsome and devoted; she with Evy's huge brown eyes and Jonathan's pointy chin, he with a breadth neither Carnahan possessed and a distinctive nose that Rick saw, softened, on Evy. "Vile! Old tabbies mewling and scratching everywhere. Nobody knew a thing till he announced it in the _Times_ , and they toured Italy and Greece for their honeymoon and never even laid eyes on jolly old England till I was halfway born, so it was a _hell_ of a scandal. Grandmamma commissioned the biggest and most expensive society portraitist she could find, and _hang_ the cost."

Catherine Carnahan was elderly - Rick wouldn't, on pain of death, call her delicate; Evy came by her force of character honestly - and lived in the Kent of her childhood, treating London society with frank disdain. Rick had been summoned to the presence almost the moment they'd landed at Dover, and had yet to recover from the shattering effect of their interview, but Jonathan said that his grandmother's final opinion - that he was very like _her_ grandfather - was the highest compliment she could bestow. Rick wasn't surprised she had championed her daughter-in-law.

"And this is Grandmamma. With the whole family. Must be the 1880s, if _all_ of them are alive. My aunt Josephine lives in America now, that's why you haven't met her, and my aunt Elvira lives in Yorkshire, but since she's the prunes and prisms member of the family I expect she'll give you a jolly awful time until I do something stupid. I say, suppose I were to do something stupid, you could rescue me and Auntie Elvy would realise Evy's decided to breed some common sense into the Carnahan line, it would -"

"No need to plan that," Rick interrupted, putting an arm around Jonathan's waist to keep him upright. "You do stupid things all the time anyway. Is this little girl your Grandmamma too?"

The child had been painted wearing a white dress with a black sash, which Rick didn't think promising, and she couldn't be more than four; the three-quarter-length oil painting next to the miniature relieved his mind, since the sad child had grown into a débutante with sparkling eyes and a very stubborn chin, dressed in a violently pink silk gown heavily embellished with lace and wearing roses in her hair. She had the fine grey eyes which had been passed down to Jonathan, except he squinted and she did not, and something of Evy in the way she carried her head. 

"That's the dandy!" Jonathan agreed - unnecessarily, since the ornate gold frame bore the legend _Miss Catherine Darracott, 1869_. "Sad story! Terribly sad. Tragiwhatsit."

"Tragedy."

"That! Grandmamma's dear papa was carried off in the Holmfirth Flood, up in lovely old Yorkshire. And since she was only little and her mother was prostrate -" Jonathan struggled over this word for some time, but eventually achieved it with triumph - "her grandmamma and grandpapa took her in! And then her mamma died of the typhoid. Horrible. Nasty, brutish and short!"

Without wanting to insult the Victorians, Rick agreed. 

"But she loved her grandparents very much," Jonathan said more softly. "And they were very good to her." He walked straight on to another image, bypassing an enormous family portrait that Rick thought must be Catherine Carnahan's grandparents with their whole family, and Rick followed him. He was still wobbling on his feet, but he had become less outrageous suddenly. "This is them."

The portrait was three-quarter length; it showed a young couple, a broad-shouldered man plainly dressed with bright blue eyes and a deceptive mischief in his expression, and a proud young woman who had given Catherine her grey eyes and straight back (and had probably bequeathed Hugo Carnahan his striking nose). She wore pale blue, and orange blossom in her curly brown hair.

"Wedding portrait," Jonathan said. "My great-great grandparents. Hugo and Anthea Darracott. He's where all the money comes from, originally. Mills in Yorkshire. All the business sense. Not that I've a speck of it." He looked at them with a strange kind of longing. "1818. He was twenty-eight, she was twenty-three. They lived happily ever after, Grandmamma always says, except for my great-grandfather's drowning… I wonder, you know…"

Rick recognised this dreamy, uneasy mood. Usually it presaged Jonathan falling asleep on the nearest sofa. He let Jonathan talk.

"He was a Rifleman… 95th. He sold out after the Napoleonic Wars… but he saw Waterloo."

Rick knew certain qualms. "Yeah?"

"I've read Wellington's letters, you know. And the other eyewitness accounts. I know Evy thinks I don't give a stuff for scholarship. Rot. I only give a stuff about what interests me. I wanted to know. So I read them." Jonathan's voice faded away. "All his dead friends, and the bodies piled in squares… he said it was the nearest-run thing you ever saw, I remember. The nearest-run thing…"

"I wonder what he would've thought of the Somme," Rick said, unable to help himself. Jonathan let out a crack of wild laughter, and subsided, for some minutes, into hysterics. Rick sat down on the floor with him and waited till he had stopped laughing.

"I wonder," Jonathan said, wiping his eyes, "if Hugo Darracott knew how to sleep through the night." He hiccupped a giggle. "Wish he would teach me. I'd love to know."

"I don't know," Rick said heavily. "If there was a trick, I'd teach it to you."

"I know. You're a good fellow, Rick. Best of good fellows." Jonathan ruffled his hair annoyingly. "Glad Evy took it into her head to marry you. Most sense we've had in this family since Hugo Darracott went the way of all flesh."

"Well, here's some sense for you." Rick heaved Jonathan to his knees, and then got them both upright. "You need to drink some water and go to bed. And we can talk about this in the morning."

"Not Evy, old chap," Jonathan said, with surprising firmness. "Can't have Evy knowing about this."

Rick hadn't the heart to tell him that it was Evy who had taught Rick to distinguish between Jonathan drunken and outrageous and Jonathan drunken, caught in the grip of memory. "No," he said. "Just us."

"Marvellous," Jonathan said generously. "You really do have all the brains in this family- except for Evy's, of course."

And then, to Rick's dismay - but not to Rick's surprise - he threw up on Rick's feet, and began, quite quietly, to cry.

  
  



End file.
